to Toshio: not sure I understand the suggestion but in the SW world the functional definition of what functions should perform the product would usually be the right approach - and a function does not assume how you are going to implement and is valid for all engineering areas

SInce the radio went off how many are still online but here is my one cent worth of a suggestion for help bridge between the two, i.e mechanical and enbedded designers. If you review our object code they are named for programmer liking term for ease of coding.

So the same talken can the embedded high level coding to be named after the mechanical engineer liking? For instance to halt machine at some instance the code naming be "machine off". Suggest developing code name with mechanical team very early on the project where it is cheap to make mistake.

Moving to engineering groups, but which: Mechanical, electrical or embedded? Or does it belong to a group that's over all of those functional departments, for example, a PLM program office or something of that ilk?

I noticed recently that PTC acquired MKS recently. I would expect that PTC will eventually try to develop an integrated change management system/work flow between electro-mechanical and SW. But I expect that a good integration will take a couple years to work out.

I have been looking into PLM systems, and although I believe that the PLM should be a bridge between the electro-mechanical development and SW development, it seems that none of the PLM solutions provide anything close to the capabilities of an Application Lifecycle Management tool. Do the PLM companies have any good recommendations/integrations to get a good workflow between PLM and ALM? Both PLM and ALM solutions will typically have some "change management" system at it's heart ... so how would you get the two of them to work together to get the "single version of the truth"?

The topic of our discussion is analogus to a project converting analog (mechanical) to digital (embedded system) back to analog (mecanical). Our world of digitalization seems wanting to separate both arena. I have been asked if I am an analog eng or digital but this embedded topic needs to find a central arena so both can envision the final product, together. I wonder these executives know this when making a decision.

This is where a systems engineer comes in but often the product design specification fails tieing both arena. I hope today's discussion identify new platform for specifying embedded project.

MPORTANT NOTE: IF YOUR COMPANY BLOCKS LIVE STREAMING AUDIO -- as a number of companies do -- YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO HEAR THE BROADCAST LIVE when it begins at 2pm eastern, in a streaming audio player which appears at the top of this page at that time. You will have to come back and access it as an archive. The archive is posted later today. However, you may want to still stick around for the live chat with our guest; he will dive in at the 2;30 pm EDT mark.

MPORTANT NOTE: IF YOUR COMPANY BLOCKS LIVE STREAMING AUDIO -- as a number of companies do -- YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO HEAR THE BROADCAST LIVE when it begins at 2pm eastern, in a streaming audio player which appears at the top of this page at that time. You will have to come back and access it as an archive. The archive is posted later today. However, you may want to still stick around for the live chat with our guest; he will dive in at the 2;30 pm EDT mark.

Welcome. Today's radio show begins at 2pm eastern. Please type in your questions at the best ones will be fed to our guest during the first 30 minutes, which constitutes the live RADIO discussion portion of the show. At 2:30 pm, our guest, Pascal Vera of Siemens, will come onto this instant chat and answer your questions directly.

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It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

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